Some believe that Bashar and Asma al-Assad are hiding in a bunker deep beneath Damascus, others that the Syrian president and his wife have relocated to a heavily protected palace in the loyalist city of Latakia.

And last week the country was rife with rumours that Mrs Assad herself had fled to Moscow with the couple's three children, soon after the bombing that claimed the lives of four senior regime officials including her husband's brother-in-law, leaving Mr Assad to run the country without her.

Russia's foreign ministry was eventually forced to deny it. "That this is a bad-natured informational trap and I advise you not to fall into it," said spokesman Alexander Lukashevich.

But after the rebel onslaught brought mayhem so close to the palace gates in Syria's capital city last week it is not surprising that such speculation is rife.

Last year Tunisia was among Arab countries which were privately offering the Assads safe haven, if they departed from power. Iran, one of the only remaining allies of the Assad regime, is another possibility; so is Russia, the regime's chief supporter at the United Nations.

Most parents would want to safeguard a young family - and many other Syrians, of all political hues, have already done exactly that by fleeing the country, or making plans to leave.

It is one of the more contradictory facts about the couple who have presided over 18 months of bloody repression of their people - with Mr Assad ordering the arrest, detention and torture of thousands of his own compatriots, or sending tanks to shell rebel villages indiscriminately - that they have tried to preserve the nearest thing possible to a normal family life.

Mr Assad is seen doting on his young children, exchanging a joke with his British-born wife, and blowing out the candles at his daughter's second birthday party. One picture shows the family in holiday mood during a flight – perhaps on the family's Falcon 900, used to fly to their favourite palace near Latakia on the Mediterranean. The president is even glimpsed contentedly taking pictures himself, enjoying his favourite hobby.

The photographs, from Mrs Assad's private collection, were handed to a foreign friend in Damascus before the uprising started in the spring of last year. They are believed to have been taken between five and seven years ago in Syria, probably by a professional photographer, and appear intended to portray the family as happy, normal and modern. Their cosy intimacy looks too natural to be have been staged.

Unseen by the photographer, and by most visitors to Syria, were the torture chambers, tanks and chemical weapons that the family relied on to maintain their brutal rule.

Also unseen among the photographs of Hafez, now aged 10, with his sister, eight-year-old Zein, and their brother Karim, now seven, are images of those less fortunate Syrian children who have died in the course of the uprising: some blown apart in artillery barrages against rebellious suburbs, others slaughtered in their villages by loyalist Shabiha militia who cut their throats in vengeful rampages.

When the photographs were taken, Mr Assad was still a relatively new president, offering a new kind of rule to Syria: he was modern, open, and had promised reform and apparently a change of direction.

He married Asma at a private ceremony in 2000 in Damascus when his promise was at its height.

Beautiful, intelligent and stylish, she threw herself into charity work and won over the hearts of many Syrians who were desperate for a breath of fresh air after years of dictatorship - an asset, it appeared, to her husband's rule.

By her own gushing account – given in an unfortunately timed interview to Vogue magazine under the headline Rose of the Desert, just before the uprising broke out last year – she started "dating" Bashar in 2000, just months before his father died and he inherited the presidency.

She was born to Syrian parents in 1975 in London, grew up in Ealing and attended London schools. She and Bashar had known each other when she was a child – he also lived in London for a while, training and working as an ophthalmologist. At the time of her courtship he was back in Syria and she had her own career as an investment banker, which she gave up for him.

"I quit in October because by then we knew that we were going to get married at some stage," she told Vogue. "I couldn't say why I was leaving. My boss thought I was having a nervous breakdown because nobody quits two months before bonus after closing a big deal."

The year 2000 was extraordinary for her husband, now 46. His father, Hafez Assad, Syria's president and one of the strongmen of the Middle East, was variously feared, respected and hated by his people. During three decades of his iron rule he supported foreign terrorist groups and carried out brutal massacres of opponents when challenged, notoriously at Hama in 1982 when as many as 20,000 people may have been killed.

Assad senior had originally prepared his ambitious oldest son, Basil, to succeed him, but he was killed in a car crash. So he transferred his attentions to Bashar, who had been assiduously groomed for the presidency for six years when his father died.

The coming to power of his son filled Syrians with hope, even though it was a dynastic transition. Hafez had been a stiff and distant father – a tyrant in both public and private life, and perhaps one reason why the youthful Bashar was shy and lacked confidence. Bashar's warm, modern family was a crucial and very successful part of the image he portrayed to the world.

In a region full of religious extremists, he was particularly keen to show the family as modern and secular.

According to those few outsiders who saw into the privacy of the family at home, the public image was completely genuine. David Lesch, an American author who met the Assads privately many times, told The Sunday Telegraph: "Both wanted to maintain as normal a life as possible for their children, even though the parents are the first couple of Syria.

"They spent most of their time living in a fairly modest three-storey Damascene home that has neighbours right next door on either side of the house. They made sure that each of them, if at all possible, spent quality time with the children every day. And they had a hidden office retreat in Damascus, where I have met both Asma and Bashar separately, where they often bring the children while they are working so they can spend time with them."

The Assads would drive around Damascus, with Asma at the wheel of an SUV – Vogue describes how she drove Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt around the city. Sometimes they would be seen walking around, even startling audiences at theatres by sitting among them. It was exciting for Syrians who had been used to the president's father.

"It was how they tried to live and maintain a fairly normal family life. This image was embellished in Syria, and it endeared them to many Syrians for years, but it was based on truth. Of course, now the normal life they had been seeking is gone for ever."

The style was modern, but the hoped-for reform never happened, and protests which followed the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Yemen were met with violence and counter-violence that has now spiralled out of control.

Those happy days of normal family life must now seem a long time ago to Mrs Assad. Wherever she is, perhaps she sometimes flicks through the family photo album - a pleasant escape as she remembers how it was when they were still Syria's golden family.